


you hang for eons (and rust all the while)

by Garecc, Gunpowderdtim (Garecc)



Series: Ready, Aim, Fire [15]
Category: High Noon Over Camelot - The Mechanisms (Album), The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: (kinda), Angst, Capital Punishment, Despair, Gen, Immortality, Implied/Referenced Dissasociation, Implied/Referenced Torture, Isolation, Kinda, Memory Loss, Missing your Family, Prophecy, Prophetic Visions, Prophets, Robots, The Hanged Man Rusts, The Pendragons; Gawain; and Galahad also have cameos, Trapped, failure - Freeform, hanging by your neck for a few hundred years is not a fun time, not like Badly but kinda, robot gore, semi-body horror, sorta??? Brian is hung so
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-18
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:02:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27610418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Garecc/pseuds/Garecc, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Garecc/pseuds/Gunpowderdtim
Summary: In which Brian hangs in Camelot for a very, very, very long time.Otherwise, Brian was hung in Camelot, and is also a prophet, and no one listens.
Series: Ready, Aim, Fire [15]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1799860
Comments: 6
Kudos: 58





	you hang for eons (and rust all the while)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [cut me down to size](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26807167) by [alderations](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alderations/pseuds/alderations). 



> This was kinda heavily inspired by Alder's fic [cut me down to size](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26807167?view_adult=true)
> 
> anyways. enjoy it.
> 
> mind the tags like really mind the tags

Your gears turn slowly, catching and grinding where you hang.

You are alone.

You hang by your neck, swaying back and forth.

You haven’t been spoken to in over a century.

Before the long long long dead sheriff strung you up here, they tried to kill you. Tried so many ways to end you. They ripped you apart more ways than you can count. More ways than you remember.

But you always came back.

Whole.

Healed.

Fine.

Eventually, they gave up on ending you, on finishing your tale, and decided to leave you to hang. 

They didn't want you to escape. Didn't want you to just be able to cut yourself down.

So they took precautions.

Your hands were fused together with a hot flame. Your joints, your knees and elbows, were treated the same.

Melted. 

You couldn’t move if you wanted to.

It hurt.

It hurt so badly.

Errors bounced up your limbs, and you knew, even if the metal-spun rope gave, you could not fix this.

Not without help.

Even if you were let go, even if you fell, you wouldn't be able to move.

You are helpless, hanging here.

You are helpless, and you are alone.

You hate being alone.

You’ve always hated being alone.

You had told your family, your friends, your companions through time and space in your infinity that you would be fine. Told them to come to retrieve you in a few thousand years.

Said that It's a space station thats long lost contact with its masters, in a sector of space where no one ever goes. It would be _fine._

You were going to stop the destruction here. 

The others had looked nervous, it wasn't often they left someone alone for that long. Wasn't often someone took a detour longer than a few hundred at most.

Not with Jonny's paranoia of the doc finding one of them alone and bioprogramming them a spy without the others knowing. 

Not with the collective fear of someone finding them and trying to figure out how they're immortal through torture.

(All of you have been tortured before, but no matter how many times it happens, it never hurts less)

(Once the seeker realizes they can't break you physically, it turns mental. And you can only last under mental torture for so long before something cracks.)

(And once you crack, it's not like you can go home immediately. After they realize they couldn’t make themselves immortal, they lack the ingredients, it's not like it's easy to get home after being dumped on a random asteroid.)

(It's not like you can collapse into your family’s arms immediately after.)

(You need to find your own way home.)

(Find your way home, all while whenever you close your eyes it's the box they locked you in, it's the starvation that crawled through you when they realized you didn’t need to eat, it's the terror of knowing no one who loves you knows where you are and you're going to be trapped here until they give up)

(Yet you do anyway.)

(You find your way home, and those who hurt you are **culled**.)

  
  


You're not exactly certain if you're really thinking anymore. You're not exactly certain how long it's been.

You can't remember the last time you strung your thoughts into full words.

Can't remember the last time you thought about anything meaningful regardless.

You are hanging. 

There is no one going to cut you down. 

You are trapped.

You are alone.

_You are alone._

You hang there and know your plan has failed.

Your prophecy failed. 

Your vision sparked into nothing. 

Because you are hanging and you could not complete what you needed to do.

The captain locked in his cabin, the general dead as well.

_You failed._

Generations pass around you and you don't talk, you just hang.

People point at you, look at you like you're a landmark, a nothing.

A _thing._

No one remembers why you are hanging here.

You hardly do either.

You're alone.

You've failed.

All you know is that you are alone, and it will be a long, long time before you are found.

You can't remember exactly when you told them to come get you, can't remember what you said at all really.

You continue to hang.

You're not exactly certain if you're really thinking anymore. You're not exactly certain how long it's been.

You can't remember the last time you strung your thoughts into full words.

Can't remember the last time you thought about anything meaningful as you hang there.

You have the notion that some circuit in your brain broke, or maybe a few too many processors shut off, or maybe you're just disassociating.

There are error messages trickling through your processors, warning you of imminent failures. Of your systems slowly failing.

But it's not exactly like you can do much of anything as you hang there, so you x out of them.

You can’t remember what you did to be hung anymore, only that it was deserved.

(You hurt someone, and this is your punishment)

(You couldn’t let yourself down if you knew how)

(You couldn’t cut yourself down if your joints weren’t melted in on themselves.)

(This is your punishment.)

Dust storms come, whipping metal and bits of rust through you.

The turbulence of getting so close to the star, you figure. That or something to do with climate regulation finally broke.

The dust seeps through the cracks in your skin, the spaces between the plates, packing itself into your machinery. Against springs and gears.

You realize you can't feel your legs after the third or fourth bad storm, the gears frozen and blocked from turning. Blocked from spinning.

You almost laugh, hysterical. You would have if your voicebox weren’t just as full of dust as the rest of you.

You choke on the rust, and you realize you want to go home.

_You want to go home._

Your neck aches in a distant way, where the rope digs into it.

Your entire body aches. Your hands are melted into themselves and it hurts.

_It hurts._

You want to curl up in your pilot's chair talking to Aurora for hours.

You want to watch Ashes and Jonny play cards, mentally tallying when either of them cheats so in the end you can reveal the truth.

You want to sit with Tim while fae infodump about faer newest guns.

You want to look at clothes with the Toy Soldier, as it excitedly shows off it's newest gowns and uniforms, shoved into almost every spare closet on Aurora.

You want to see what new books Ivy has collected.

You want to sit with Nastya as she fixes a bullethole, cursing Jonny’s existence.

You want to be dragged into Raph’s lab for whatever nonsense she has planned.

You want to be fetched by Marius as a ‘second opinion’ regarding a medical issue, and you want to play along to his charade.

You want to curl up in your own bed.

You want to go home.

_You want to go home._

You’ve noticed yourself rusting, corroding a while ago during a moment where you drifted towards something almost like being lucid.

You've lost feeling in your legs. 

There are no errors anymore.

The dust having filled every spare inch of space inside you, and rust having eaten through enough of the gears and wires that they must be almost gone.

Beyond the haze, your entire body aches, and distantly you can feel your circuits shorting out.

You want to go home.

You realized your memory is spotty. You can hardly remember far too many things.

Your memory circuits rusting and snapping, your processors full of corrupted files.

It's terrifyingly familiar.

It's terrifying.

_You continue to rust._

The metal sheets that make your skin have long corroded.

You have long rusted.

You hang there.

Alone.

Somewhere in the distance, you hear gunshots.

Somewhere in the distance, _you feel like something has changed._

Not long later a trio approaches you.

You jolt back to something that was almost lucidity as one speaks. 

“What the _hell_ is that?” A woman’s voice says, and she walks towards you. Looking at you critically. It's obvious she doesn't know what to make of you.

Your voicebox is too full of dust and rust for you to speak, your joints locked by centuries of disuse and still long-melted and you cannot move.

You don't recognize her.

You thought you had been able to recognize anyone in this town.

“It looks like it's looking at me.” She scowls. “I hate it.”

“Looks like a.. What’s the word? Automaton?” Another says.

“Looks like there’s something written on its chest.” The third says, and the woman steps forward. 

“It's _old_ .” She says, examining your chest. “Real hard to make out, I think it says M.. I think thats an R, that looks almost like an L. I _think_ thats an N. Merlin maybe? I think it says Merlin.”

“Is that what it's called? Merlin?”

“Probably. Doesn't matter.” She steps away from you, and nods at the others. 

“It doesn’t matter anyway.” The second says. “We have more important shit to do than investigate a weird fucking statue.”

You have no idea what to make of that, but you almost manage a smile, would have if your facial expressions hadn’t crashed as they tried to run on your broken buffering processors.

You feel your memory circuits winding themselves whole as you realize _you haven’t failed here._

You haven’t doomed this world.

In fact, the _real_ story was only just beginning.

You hadn’t failed here, and _you can still save this world._

Your mind is clear again, no longer slow and buffering. Your vents are clear and your fans whirr, clearing paths as dust and grit fall from the cracks. Your processors are running and you _know what you must do._

The Station is falling into Avalon, and the story is merely beginning.

You are not in the falling action, you're in the _exposition._

(You wonder if this is why the others never came to retrieve you, if the narrative force that drives you all wanted you to collect this story)

They go, and for the first time in eons, _you feel something that isn’t despair._

Years pass, and all you hang there. Wisps of the future wind themselves through your mind.

The station slowly falling into Avalon, the siege seat, Mordred, the G.R.A.I.L. Gawains hate, Galahad’s fate. 

The pieces clicking together.

_You might be able to work with this._

Your limbs might be packed with rust, your skin might be corroded, your joints may be fused, and you may be helpless to saving yourself, you can help these people, and your family _will_ collect you when the tale is done.

It's a calm evening when Gawain happens to wander past the gallows alone. 

You open your mouth, jaw clicking and grinding as you move your mouth for the first time in millennia. For the first time since the sheriff who strung you up died. 

There is a loud pop as the gear in your jaw finally turns, and your Mechanism, upon being prompted, repairs the rest of it.

Gawain jolts, staring towards you, but not directly at you. He doesn't know what he heard, and of course, he doesn't know you are alive.

No one here does, they merely think you a statue.

“Gawain.” Your voice is cracked, gravely. Voicebox full of static and cracks. You wheeze up some of the dust inside it. 

He stares at you for a moment, confusion painted on his face. “..Hanged Man?” he just sounds confused.

You begin to talk, your prophecies roiling in your mind. 

His eyes widen as you talk, as you know so much about him, but harden halfway through as he gets over his shock. 

And of course, he doesn't receive it well.

Doesn't understand what you are saying.

He leaves, more bitter than before. Sharper with hate.

You're disappointed, but you haven’t given up yet. You _refuse_ to give up too easily.

You _haven’t_ failed yet, and there are two other people to talk to.

Two other prophecies to give.

You speak to Arther next, when he walks up to you not an hour later. 

He looks at you with an unyielding glare, he doesn't know what you are, but you know you must talk.

And he, like the first sheriff of Camelot, does _not_ want a metal demon in his town.

You begin your prophecy of Mordred’s return, as you begin to speak he looks startled, shock written in his expression. You very much doubt he believed Gawain’s tale of you talking, of spinning knowledge you have no way of knowing, but as you continue, like Gawain his gaze hardens. 

He looks almost angry.

Then he informs you he never had a son, and your heart sinks.

(Your prophecies don't include things so trivial as assigned genders at birth.) 

He turns and stalks away.

You hang there, swaying softly side to side, and you fear the world may be doomed.

If Galahad does not listen, it will be. You try not to be disheartened, but it's hard.

_It's so hard._

It's not long until Galahad comes to see you, he pauses in front of you, staring up at you. Mouth quirked in a curious smile. 

The rumor of your talking has spread through the town, and has reached the traveling preacher.

And so you begin talking, begging him to believe you. 

You think he may think you something like an angel. He listens intently, and _agrees._

You feel nothing but relief as he talks, promises he won’t forget what you told him, promises he will follow through to his fate.

You know his fate to be death, but you do not doubt his faith. 

You watch him go, and a smile passes across your lips.

You dare to hope that maybe you have succeeded.

Maybe, just this once, there could be a happy ending.

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> tumblr @Louchie  
> mechs tumblr: @Gunpowderdtim


End file.
